I asked AI for help with DIY. It told me to build a subfloor on rotting stumps, but also taught me valuable lessons |
I am not, by nature, an early adopter. There comes a point in our lives where change becomes more irritating than exciting and, I suspect, I reached it sooner than most. But when a workplace recently tasked me with exploring practical applications for AI, I spotted an opportunity to cast off my luddite inclinations.
It turned out AI was very good at mimicking most of the things I could already do. Irrespective of quality, it could churn out articles, reports, presentations, fiction, even podcasts with stammering hosts. That was no use to me. What I wanted help with was all the stuff I was useless at. There was an obvious target: DIY.
It helped that this tasking coincided with our purchase of an old house in need of extensive TLC. Before settlement, I had managed to convince myself – if not my partner – that I would be able to conduct many of the smaller repairs the property desperately needed. This was quite an achievement, as I come from a family of great renovators and tradespeople and I have been made aware, from a very young age, that those particular genes were not passed on to me.
My experience of AI in the workplace is that it behaves like the worst member of any team. It will do the bare minimum, it will invent nonsense instead of checking its facts, and it will consistently lie to you about whether it actually did the work. Nonetheless, I embarked on our renovations with........